August 3, 2017

In Ross Terrill’s The New Chinese Empire he makes the assertion that Mao Zedong was the heir of the moralist Confucian tradition, while Deng Xiaoping’s stances looked more toward pragmatic Legalism. I don’t want to rehash why Terrill presented this strange framework as a central thesis in his book. Rather, there was an instance that I found memorable where he observed that Deng was much more particular about pointing out territorial losses that China had suffered with foreign dignitaries than Mao. Deng was more conventionally nationalistic.

I always felt that this required some chutzpah on Deng’s part. The map above shows clearly why I found it curious: the maximal extend of the Chinese Empire in the 19th century was to due to the imperial ambitions of the Manchu people, under whose yoke the Han experienced centuries of being a subordinate group. Of course it is true that just as Greece conquered Rome, so the Manchus assimilated into Chinese society to such an extent that today they have basically been absorbed by the Han in all but name. And famously, rulers such as the Kangxi Emperor and the Qianlong Emperor, became for their Han subjects, that is the vast majority of them, paragons of the Confucian potentate.

But the Manchus always remained Manchus, self-conscious that they were a ruling people. They struggled against their assimilation, and in their conquests outside of their civilized Chinese heartland the emperors became Manchurian warlords (the Kangxi Emperor in particular paints a broadly as a steppe warlord when he deigned to take on that persona). They were a people from from beyond the Great Wall, who had good relations with the Khalkha Mongols, and cultivated the Buddhist statelets of greater Tibet. In China, but not always of it. In other words, the empire which the republic of China inherited by and large was the achievement of a non-Chinese people.

Modern borders are what they are. Accidents of history. I don’t begrudge the Han Chinese for having inheriting the Manchu Empire. To some extent it’s their luck. But it’s a little strange that Deng Xiaoping would assume that the borders of the Treaty of Nerchinsk, signed in 1689, were somehow sacrosanct. The Manchus were at this period waxing into the fullness of their powers, and blocked Russia from bringing the Amur basin into its hegemony (and also banned Han from migrating into these new territories!).

China’s most cosmopolitan native dynasty, the Tang*, did have dominion over much of what is today called Xinjiang. Their forces famously clashed with that of the Abbasids at Talas in modern day Kyrgyzstan. But this dominion lasted only a century. The earlier Han dynasty hegemonies over the eastern Silk Road cities were also short-lived.

As you can see on this map the Tang had to contend with a powerful Tibetan Empire, as well as Uighurs and Goturks to their north. On the northeast, in modern Manchuria, were the Khitan people, who would later reappear in Chinese history.

The reality is that for most of Chinese history half of what is today China was not part of China. If the Manchus had not conquered China, and the Ming had been replaced by an indigenous dynasty, it seems entirely likely that the outlines of the modern nation-state of China would be coterminous with with the outlines of the Ming dynasty polity.

To me a plausible “alternative history” then would result in Xinjiang and Mongolia being absorbed into the orbit of the Russia Empire, and perhaps both today being post-Soviet states. In fact, northern Xinjiang would be a distinct post-Soviet state, because prior to genocidal campaigns by the Manchus in the 18th century this area was dominated by a western branch of the Mongol people, the Oirats. It seems likely that Tibet would have fallen more explicitly under the British orbit, and become independent along with India and other South and Southeast Asian nations after World War II.

This historical context is relevant to the situation of why minority groups such as Uyghurs and Tibetans chafe under Chinese rule, especially when told that they have always been part of China. It also is important because it gives a sense of cultural and historical affinities which might go unnoticed.

Broadly speaking Korea, and to a lesser extent Japan and Vietnam (in different ways), have been part of the broader “Sinic civilization.” There are differences of detail, particularly in Japan and Vietnam, in how Chinese culture was interpreted, but its influence is undeniable. This is less clear in places like Tibet and Mongolia. I believe people sometimes confuse Chinese cultural influence with China’s geopolitical heft and the fact that to Westerners these people look East Asian, so how could they not be influenced by China despite their proximity?

The Economist recently published a fascinating article in its 1843 magazine, Animal spirits, about the revival of Mongolian shamanism. But this section is simply false: “While Buddhism is an import from China, shamanism is an expression of Mongolian national identity.” Mongols are mostly Tibetan Buddhists, and they received their Buddhism from Tibetan lamas and monks. Not Chinese. It is technically an important from China in that Tibet is part of China, but it was not part of China when it was propagating Buddhism to Mongolia!

For a detailed exploration of the Mongol religious conversion to Tibetan Buddhism, and their flirtation with Islam**, see Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road. What I will say is that it does not seem to be a surprise that Mongols seem to have a history of flirting with non-Chinese religions. Many of Genghis Khan’s subjects during his rise to power were at least nominally Syriac Christians. Though Genghis Khan was an adherent of shamanism, he patronized religious professionals of many sects, and had a particularly close relationship with a Daoist monk.

Geographically Tibet is obviously within the borders of the modern Chinese nation-state (though Ladakh in India is arguably a fragment of Tibet which landed on the Indian side of the border). But recall that for most of its history Tibet has not been under Chinese rule. Perhaps even more importantly, Tibet has not been under much Chinese influence. On the contrary, Tibetan lamas have been cultural impresarios, exporting their religious vision to the court of Kublai Khan, then that of the Manchus, and the finally converting the Khans of the various Mongol tribes.

And in terms of its precursors, Tibetan Buddhism is the child of the last flowering of North Indian Buddhism, not Chinese Buddhism, which had evolved into an independent tradition by the time the Tibetan Empire was deciding on an institutional religion to adhere to (Chinese Buddhism was reputedly brought to the kingdom first, by a Chinese princess).*** And the Tibetan alphabet is also derived from an Indian script. Curiously, just as Indian high-level cultural influence is very salient in Southeast Asia, so it is in Buddhist Inner Asia. But while Southeast Asian Indian influences were usually maritime South Indian, those of Tibetan are from a bygone North India where Islam was marginal and Buddhism was still a presence.

Despite being a far weaker military power than the United States China is already flexing its muscle and bullying its neighbors. There are a million Chinese in Africa. Even though China may not catch up with the United States in median affluence any time soon, the trajectory of aggregate economic production is such it will likely become the the largest economy within the next half generation. The Chinese know this, and are already acting as if they are #1. They’re preparing for their “time in the sun.”

Unfortunately this will exacerbate some of the unfortunate intellectual tendencies among the Chinese due to arrogance combined with a lack of total confidence in their new position. The Chinese view of their past has strange distortions, generally having to do with the fact that they don’t want to admit that their possession of vast swaths of Inner Asia was more a matter of historical happenstance than a necessary consequence of the geographical logic of the Chinese civilization-state.

But the truth is what it is. Unfortunately I suspect implicitly the media will begin telegraphing the Chinese viewpoint without much challenge because it seems plausible enough to those that they don’t know. It will be up to us to keep the unknowing propagandists in check.

* I am aware of their Xianbei heritage, but they were highly Sinicized and by the time of great Xuanzong Emperor they were mostly Han in origin.

** Mongols outside of the homeland invariably eventually became Muslims over time.

*** I am aware that Chinese Buddhism itself has an Indian source, though mediated through the cities of the Silk Road.

Comments Off on Manufacturing Chinese history cheaply

October 20, 2010

One of the great geological landmarks on earth are the Himalayas. Not only are the Himalayas of importance in the domain of physical geography, but they are important in human geography as well. Just as South Asians and non-South Asians agree that the valley of the Indus and its tributaries bound the west of the Indian cultural world, so the Himalayas bound it on the north. Unlike many pre-modern constructions, such as the eastern boundary of Europe, the northern limit of South Asia is relatively clear and distinct. It is stark on a relief map; the flat Gangetic plain gives way to mountains. And it is stark a cultural map, the languages of northern India give way to those of the world of Tibet. The religion of northern India gives way to the Buddhism of Tibet. In terms of human geography I believe that one can argue that the Himalayan fringe around South Asia exhibits the greatest change of ancestrally informative gene frequencies over the smallest distance when you exclude those regions separated by water barriers. Unlike the Sahara the transect from the northern India to Chinese Tibet at any given point along the border is permanently inhabited, albeit sparsely at the heights.

And yet despite the geographical barriers people and ideas did move across the Himalaya. The cultural influences upon Tibet from India are obvious. The script of Tibet is derived from India, while its form of Buddhism is the direct descendant of the last efflorescence of that religion in northern India. But while culture moved north, I do not see much evidence genetically that South Asians have been significant as an influence. This is somewhat shocking when you realize these two facts: the population of the Tibetan Autonomous Region is on the order of 5-6 million, while that of northern South Asia around ~1 billion (including Pakistan and Bangladesh). A 200-fold difference. And yet there is evidence of admixture between the two groups exactly where you’d expect: in Nepal. Below is a figure from a recent paper which shows how South and East Asian populations relate to each other. I’ve highlighted the Nepali groups, which span the two larger classes:

From the above figure it’s clear that there is considerable admixture among the Indo-European populations of Nepal with a Tibetan element. The Magar are a tribe which is representative of Tibet, with little South Asian genetic input presumably. The Newar are the Nepalese hybrids par excellence. To a great extent they can be viewed as the indigenous peoples of the Kathmandu region at the heart of modern Nepal. Their language is of Tibetan affinity, and yet it is heavily overlain with an Indo-Aryan aspect, and seems to have within it an ancient Austro-Asiatic substrate. Though predominantly Hindu today, the Newar have a substantial Buddhist minority whose roots may go back to the original Mahayana traditions which were once prominent in northern India. The Brahmin and Chetri groups are upper caste communities who claim provenance from the north Indian plain. Some of these upper caste groups in Nepal are of recent vintage, having fled the Islamic conquests of the Gangetic plain within the last 1,000 years. And yet even they have obvious Tibetan admixture. This should make one cautious about the excessive claims to genetic purity which South Asian caste groups make.

But admixture of a Tibetan or East Asian component in South Asia is not limited to Nepal. I have reedited a figure from a 2006 paper on Indian Americans which shows the inferred components of ancestry of various language-groups. It is clear that the northeastern groups, Bengalis, Assamese, and Oriya, have an affinity to East Asians. This is not just ancient east Eurasian ancestry, the “Ancestral South Indians” hypothesized in Reich et al.. The South Indian groups (which I have excised from the figure) do not exhibit the same level of elevation of the ancestral quantum dominant among the Han Chinese in the bar plot. In fact the Reich et al. paper also reported evidence of an eastern ancestral element in some of the Munda speaking groups of northeast India. This stands to reason as the Munda are a South Asian branch of the Austro-Asiatic family of Southeast Asia. But much of it may also be more recent, as groups such as the Ahom of Assam and the Chakma of Bangladesh seem to have arrived from Burma of late.

It is being realized that identification of subgroups within normal controls corresponding to contrasting disease susceptibility is likely to lead to more effective predictive marker discovery. We have previously used the Ayurvedic concept of Prakriti, which relates to phenotypic differences in normal individuals, including response to external environment as well as susceptibility to diseases, to explore molecular differences between three contrasting Prakriti types: Vata, Pitta, and Kapha. EGLN1 was one among 251 differentially expressed genes between the Prakriti types. In the present study, we report a link between high-altitude adaptation and common variations rs479200 (C/T) and rs480902 (T/C) in the EGLN1 gene. Furthermore, the TT genotype of rs479200, which was more frequent in Kapha types and correlated with higher expression of EGLN1, was associated with patients suffering from high-altitude pulmonary edema, whereas it was present at a significantly lower frequency in Pitta and nearly absent in natives of high altitude. Analysis of Human Genome Diversity Panel-Centre d’Etude du Polymorphisme Humain (HGDP-CEPH) and Indian Genome Variation Consortium panels showed that disparate genetic lineages at high altitudes share the same ancestral allele (T) of rs480902 that is overrepresented in Pitta and positively correlated with altitude globally (P< 0.001), including in India. Thus, EGLN1 polymorphisms are associated with high-altitude adaptation, and a genotype rare in highlanders but overrepresented in a subgroup of normal lowlanders discernable by Ayurveda may confer increased risk for high-altitude pulmonary edema.

The paper itself is a follow up to a previous work attempting to see if there was a sense to the classification of constitutions found within Ayurvedic medicine. Like Chinese medicine this is a non-Western tradition which has different philosophical roots and axioms (Galenic medicine might be analogous). But in theory all medical traditions emerged to battle illness, so their target was unitary, the ailments which plague the human body. Therefore one might suppose that in fact there would be some sense in any long-standing medical tradition which has any empirical grounding, because human biology is relatively invariant. It is the relative clause which is of interest for the purposes of this paper, because the authors show how the classifications of Ayurvedic medicine seem to comport with the recent genetic evidence of high altitude adaptation! Specifically they found that particular Ayurvedic classes of individuals who seem to have negative reactions to high altitude exposure in the form of hypoxia tend to be carriers of particular EGLN1 genotypes.

I will at this point observe that since I don’t know much about Ayurveda I won’t address or cover that issue in detail. The paper is Open Access so you can read it yourself. So let’s move to the genetics. EGLN1 should be familiar to you by now. It’s cropped up repeatedly over the past year in studies ofhigh altitudeadaptation. It is a locus which seems to be a target of selection in both the peoples of the Andes and Tibet. Additionally, it has a peculiar aspect where the ancestral variant, the one found most frequently within Africa, seems to be the target of selection for altitude adaptation outside of Africa.

The slideshow below is an overview of the primary figures within this paper.

What do we take away from this? Well, one aspect which I think is important to emphasize is that genetic background matters, and there’s much we don’t know. In the conclusion the authors note that the altitude adaptation papers which I alluded to above were not published when the manuscript was being written, so they were not privy to the rather repeated robust evidence that EGLN1 has been the target of natural selection, and that variation on the locus is correlated with variation in adaptation to higher altitudes. The widespread coverage of populations in this paper seems to almost obscure as much as highlight. What has African variation to do with this after all? Additionally one must always remember that one given marker on a gene which shows a correlation does not entail functional causation. We saw this with the markers which seemed to predict the odds of an individual of European ancestry having blue eyes; it turned out that the markers themselves were simply strongly associated with another SNP which was probably the real functional root behind the difference in phenotype.

Due to the replication of EGLN1 in both Andeans and Tibetans I am moderately confident that variation on this gene does have something to due with high altitude adaptation. What I am curious about is the fact that the ancestral alleles in many cases seem to be driven up on frequency. Is there an interaction between the genetic background of non-Africans and the SNPs in question which make it beneficial toward altitude adaptation? Was there an initial relaxation of function as human populations moved out of Africa, which was slammed back on at high altitudes? There does seem a correlation within South Asian populations between hypoxia and high altitudes and particular variants on EGLN1. Focusing just on this region we can draw some reasonable inferences, but taking a bigger picture view and encompassing the whole world we’re confronted with a rather more confused, and perhaps more interesting, picture.

Back to the specific issue of the lack of South Asian imprint on the genes of Tibetan peoples, I think one can chalk this up to the fact that humans are animals, and so we’re constrained by geography and biology. Tibetans can operate efficiently at lower altitudes, and so have mixed with South Asians in these regions. In contrast, South Asians can not operate at higher altitudes, and so the impact on Tibetans was purely cultural, and not genetic. More broadly this may also point to long term geopolitical implications: the Han Chinese demographic domination of Tibet is always going to be a matter of water flowing uphill. Unless of course we flesh out the genetic architecture of these traits well enough that the Chinese government knows exactly which individuals among the 1.2 billion Han population would be most biologically prepared to reside in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, and so can proactively recruit them to settle in Lhasa and other strategic locations.

Residents of the Tibetan Plateau show heritable adaptations to extreme altitude. We sequenced 50 exomes of ethnic Tibetans, encompassing coding sequences of 92% of human genes, with an average coverage of 18x per individual. Genes showing population-specific allele frequency changes, which represent strong candidates for altitude adaptation, were identified. The strongest signal of natural selection came from endothelial Per-Arnt-Sim (PAS) domain protein 1 (EPAS1), a transcription factor involved in response to hypoxia. One single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) at EPAS1 shows a 78% frequency difference between Tibetan and Han samples, representing the fastest allele frequency change observed at any human gene to date. This SNP’s association with erythrocyte abundance supports the role of EPAS1 in adaptation to hypoxia. Thus, a population genomic survey has revealed a functionally important locus in genetic adaptation to high altitude.

The exome is just the protein-coding part of the genome; so they’re focusing ostensibly on functionally relevant single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). About a month and a half ago a similar paper on Tibetan high altitude adaptations was published in Science (I posted on that too), but their methodology was somewhat different. That group was looking at a set of genes, candidates, which they’d assume might have been under selection and so have functional significance in explaining Tibetan vs. non-Tibetan phenotypes at high altitudes. This second paper takes a more bottom up approach, scanning the genome of Tibetans and Han Chinese, and trying to spotlight regions which exhibit a great deal of between population variance, far greater than one might presume from the total genome genetic distances.

As to that last point…the timing of this has been causing a major problem with archaeologists. The supplements lays out the details a bit more than the press reports, so below is figure 2:

It looks like to get a better sense of the model you’ll have to read the cited paper, and I’m not sure that that will satisfy the archaeologists. They did use a large number of neutral markers though, so I’m not too worried about biases in their data set. Some have been confused about the population numbers, but this value in a population genetic context can be counterintuitive, especially over the long term (low values are given much more weight than high values). The small Han value can be easily made less confusing when you consider a massive demographic expansion from a small founder group, as well as persist long term biases in reproductive value within the population (e.g., some males in a given generation are way more fecund than others through polygyny). A higher N for Tibetans may be explained by a more stable population where diverse subsets and across individuals the reproductive value may be more equitable. In other words, an effective population size is a statistic which is bundling together a lot of evolutionary history, and is not a simple measure of perceived census sizes (the Tibetans may also be something of a melange of a diverse set of ancient groups which took refuge in the highlands, while the Han are the descendants of early adopters of agriculture which expanded demographically; so they’re opposite ends of the demographic tunnel).

The time of divergence of a little under 3,000 years is important for the rest of the paper, so I suppose other workers had better replicate their findings in the future. Figure 1 is rather striking, so let’s jump to it:

This chart is simply showing frequencies of SNPs in Tibetans and Han. The two are obviously correlated, as evident by the diagonal. Shading indicates the density of the number of SNPs at a given position. Look to the bottom right, and you see the gene around which much of the paper hinges, EPAS1. It’s an enormous outlier, with SNPs where Tibetans and Han differ a great deal. This is important in regards to looking for genes which may drive adaptation to higher altitudes; if you don’t have different genes then you don’t have different traits. If the Tibetans and Han diverged ~3,000 years ago, then those adaptations may be recent and would have emerged through rapid allele frequency changes (though they observe that it may be drawn from standing variation). The researchers didn’t go looking for EPAS1 as such, rather, it came looking for them. What does it do? From the text:

EPAS1 is also known as hypoxia-inducible factor 2{alpha} (HIF-2{alpha}). The HIF family of transcription factors consist of two subunits, with three alternate {alpha} subunits (HIF-1{alpha}, HIF-2{alpha}/EPAS1, HIF-3{alpha}) that dimerize with a β subunit encoded by ARNT or ARNT2. HIF-1{alpha} and EPAS1 each act on a unique set of regulatory targets…and the narrower expression profile of EPAS1 includes adult and fetal lung, placenta, and vascular endothelial cells…A protein-stabilizing mutation in EPAS1 is associated with erythrocytosis…suggesting a link between EPAS1 and the regulation of red blood cell production.

Next, they dig into the functional significant of EPAS1 variants, in the literature, and in their current sample:

Associations between SNPs at EPAS1 and athletic performance have been demonstrated…Our data set contains a different set of SNPs, and we conducted association testing on the SNP with the most extreme frequency difference, located just upstream of the sixth exon. Alleles at this SNP tested for association with blood-related phenotypes showed no relationship with oxygen saturation. However, significant associations were discovered for erythrocyte count (F test P = 0.00141) and for hemoglobin concentration (F test P = 0.00131), with significant or marginally significant P values for both traits when each village was tested separately (table S5). Comparison of the EPAS1 SNP to genotype data from 48 unlinked SNPs confirmed that its P value is a strong outlier (5) (fig. S4).

The allele at high frequency in the Tibetan sample was associated with lower erythrocyte quantities and correspondingly lower hemoglobin levels…Because elevated erythrocyte production is a common response to hypoxic stress, it may be that carriers of the “Tibetan” allele of EPAS1 are able to maintain sufficient oxygenation of tissues at high altitude without the need for increased erythrocyte levels. Thus, the hematological differences observed here may not represent the phenotypic target of selection and could instead reflect a side effect of EPAS1-mediated adaptation to hypoxic conditions. Although the precise physiological mechanism remains to be discovered, our results suggest that the allele targeted by selection is likely to confer a functionally relevant adaptation to the hypoxic environment of high altitude.

There are random anomalies in nature, but it seems too perfect that this is the outlier in allele frequencies across two populations which differ in adaptations which relate to many of the traits above.

OK, so they found an outlier SNP. The gene seems to have a reasonable probability of being involved in functional pathways relevant to altitude adaptation. But so far we’ve been focusing on the Tibetan-Han difference. If the two populations separated about 3,000 years ago one assumes that genes with SNPs with huge Fsts, where most of the variation can be partitioned between the groups, not within them, are good candidates for having been driven by selection. But it would be nice to compare with an outgroup. So they compared the Tibetans and Hans with the Danes, who are an outgroup who separated from the East Asian cluster about one order of magnitude further back in time (~30,000 years). Next they generated a “population branch statistic,” (PBS), from the the Fst data (see the supplements). Basically you’re getting a value which describes allele frequency differences normalized to the expected genetic distance as known from population history. I’ve extracted out Panel B from figure 2. T = Tibetans, H = Han, and D = Danes. The smaller tree represents genome average PBS values. It’s what you’d expect, the Danes are the outgroup. Over time genetic difference builds up because of separation between the groups. The Han and Tibetans are very close, as you’d expect from genetically similar populations. But look at the larger tree, the Tibetans are the outgroup by a mile! The Danes and Han differ far less from each other on EPAS1 than they do from the Tibetans. This seems like a clear deviation from the level of allele frequency difference one might be able to generate by neutral random walk processes.

EPAS1 isn’t the only gene which they found, but it was the most significant, and illustrates the nature of the methodological orientation of this group. Sift through the genome and look for something which is totally unexpected, and put a focus on the peculiar diamond in the rough and see what it can tell you. They conclude with the big picture:

Of the genes identified here, only EGLN1 was mentioned in a recent SNP variation study in Andean highlanders (24). This result is consistent with the physiological differences observed between Tibetan and Andean populations…suggesting that these populations have taken largely distinct evolutionary paths in altitude adaptation.

Several loci previously studied in Himalayan populations showed no signs of selection in our data set…whereas EPAS1 has not been a focus of previous altitude research. Although EPAS1 may play an important role in the oxygen regulation pathway, this gene was identified on the basis of a noncandidate population genomic survey for natural selection, illustrating the utility of evolutionary inference in revealing functionally important loci.

Given our estimate that Han and Tibetans diverged 2750 years ago and experienced subsequent migration, it appears that our focal SNP at EPAS1 may have experienced a faster rate of frequency change than even the lactase persistence allele in northern Europe, which rose in frequency over the course of about 7500 years…EPAS1 may therefore represent the strongest instance of natural selection documented in a human population, and variation at this gene appears to have had important consequences for human survival and/or reproduction in the Tibetan region.

Natural selection is somewhat stochastic; it can take different tacks to the same process because it doesn’t have infinite power in its search algorithm. Given enough time and gene flow no doubt adaptations would homogenize and converge upon a perfect optimum, but given enough time the universe will devolve into heat death. Evolution has to operate extemporaneously for eternity because the conditions are ever changing. Second, the big headline grabbing assertion about EPAS1 being the strongest instance of natural selection needs to be moduled by the fact that the conclusion was generated assuming the validity of the inferences of a particular model, and models can be wrong. It does seem like the evolutionary change is likely to be recent, I doubt they’d be off by an order of magnitude. But for lactase persistence we’ve extracted genetic material from ancient remains. The conclusion then is much more concrete in this case. Until we get remains from ancient Tibetans and can infer their allele frequencies, there will be some asymmetry in the confidence with which we can make a claim as to when the selection event began.

July 1, 2010

Nick Wade in The New York Times is reporting on a new paper which will come out in Science tomorrow which investigates the evolution of genes implicated in adaption to higher altitudes among Tibets. I’ve posted on the genetics of this topic before, it obviously is of great interest. The major new finding is that these adaptations seem to have spread among Tibetans very recently, on the order of 3,000 years or so. Here’s the relevant section on the genetic architecture:

The Beijing team analyzed the 3 percent of the human genome in which known genes lie in 50 Tibetans from two villages at an altitude of 14,000 feet and in 40 Han Chinese from Beijing, which is 160 feet above sea level. Many genes exist in a population in alternative versions. The scientists found some 30 genes in which a version rare among the Han had become common among the Tibetans. The most striking instance was a version of a gene possessed by 9 percent of Han but 87 percent of Tibetans.

Such an enormous difference indicates that the version typical among Tibetans is being strongly favored by natural selection. In other words, its owners are evidently leaving more children than those with different versions of the gene.

The gene in question is known as hypoxia-inducible factor 2-alpha, or HIF-2a, and the Tibetans with the favored version have fewer red blood cells and hence less hemoglobin in their blood.

But the more confused issue is the accuracy of the time timing:

The three new reports agree in finding the Tibetans’ version of the gene has been favored by natural selection. But the Beijing Genome Institute’s calculation that the Tibetan and Han populations split apart only 3,000 years ago is less likely to be accepted. Archaeologists believe the Tibetan plateau has been inhabited for at least 7,000 years and maybe for as long as 21,000 years.

“The separation of Tibetans and Hans at 3,000 years ago is simply not tenable by anything we know from the historical, archaeological or linguistic record,” said Mark Aldenderfer, a Tibetan expert at the University of California, Merced.

Dr. Aldenderfer said that there had probably been many migrations onto the Tibetan plateau, and that there was indirect evidence that pastoralists had entered the plateau from the north-northeast around 6,000 years ago. Earlier genetic studies have found that Tibetans are more similar to northern Han than to those from southern China, and have some admixtuWell, re of genes from Central Asia, he said.

Geneticists have a more elastic view of dates than do archaeologists, and the estimate of a Han-Tibetan population split at 3,000 years ago could probably have been adjusted to 6,000 or later if the geneticists had taken any account of any other kind of evidence.

Rasmus Nielsen, a Danish researcher currently at the University of California at Berkeley, did the statistical calculations for the Beijing study. “We feel fairly confident that something on the order of 3,000 years is correct,” he said. But in a later e-mail message he explained that “I cannot with confidence rule out that the divergence time is 6,000 instead of 3,000.”

I haven’t seen the paper, but I assume that the 3,000 years figure was derived from the point at which selective sweeps started diverging the genetic architecture of adaptations related to altitude phenotypes. But there is probably a pretty large confidence interval here, and previous estimates have been revised upward (though Nielsen is one of the best in the game, and he sounds relatively confident). I don’t see why the length of human habitation is that relevant, populations move, or are replaced. Archaeologists simply have a very strong bias against population movements, and tend to see cultural continuity in their interpretation of physical remains. Very similar things were asserted by archaeologists when the first genetic evidence on the exogenous origin of the Etruscans came to light. I assume there are many scholarly careers which have been based on fleshing out the cultural continuities of societies and cultures on the Tibetan plateau, and the idea that contemporary Tibetans are newcomers would overturn that.

More to say tomorrow when the paper comes out. But ScienceDaily has some more details:

The widespread mutation in Tibetans is near a gene called EPAS1, a so-called “super athlete gene” identified several years ago and named because some variants of the gene are associated with improved athletic performance, Nielsen said. The gene codes for a protein involved in sensing oxygen levels and perhaps balancing aerobic and anaerobic metabolism.

…

“We can’t distinguish intermixing and replacement,” Nielsen said. “The Han Chinese and Tibetans are as different from one another as if the Han completely replaced the Tibetans about 3,000 years ago.”

The Tibetan and Han Chinese genomes are essentially identical in terms of the frequency of polymorphisms in the roughly 20,000 genes, though some 30 genes stood out because of dramatic differences between the Tibetans and the Han.
“We made a list of the genes that changed the most,” Nielsen said, “and what was fascinating was that, bing!, at the top of that list was a gene that had changed very strongly, and it was related to the response to oxygen.”

The SNP with the most dramatic change in frequency, from 9 percent in Han Chinese to 87 percent in Tibetans, was associated with lower red blood cell count and lower hemoglobin levels in Tibetans. That variation occurred near a gene called EPAS1, which earlier studies suggest is involved in regulating hemoglobin in the blood as a response to oxygen levels. The mutation may be in a transcription factor that regulates the activity of EPAS1.

Tibetans carrying only one allele with this mutation had about the same hemoglobin concentration as Han Chinese, but those with two mutated alleles had significantly lower hemoglobin concentration. However, they all have about the same oxygen concentration in the blood. For some reason, individuals with two copies of the mutation function well in high altitude with relatively low hemoglobin concentration in their blood. The mutation seems to provide an alternative inborn mechanism for dealing with the low oxygen levels, Nielsen said.

I’m intrigued that this seems to express recessively in terms of the trait-value they looked at. I wonder if there are other fitness benefits in the heterozygote state which allowed it to increase in frequency rapidly so that the benefits in the homozygote state could express.

Image Credit: Wikimedia

Comments Off on Very recent altitude adaptation in Tibet

May 14, 2010

You probably are aware that different populations have different tolerances for high altitudes. Himalayan sherpas aren’t useful just because they have skills derived from their culture, they’re actually rather well adapted to high altitudes because of their biology. Additionally, different groups seem to have adapted to higher altitudes independently, exhibiting convergent evolution. But in terms of physiological function they aren’t all created equal, at least in relation to the solutions which they’ve come to to make functioning at high altitudes bearable. In particular, it seems that the adaptations of the peoples of Tibet are superior than those of the peoples of the Andes. Superior in that the Andean solution is more brute force than the Tibetan one, producing greater side effects, such as lower birth weight in infants (and so higher mortality and lower fitness).

The Andean region today is dominated by indigenous people, and Spanish is not the lingua franca of the highlands as it is everyone in in the former colonial domains of Spain in the New World. This is largely a function of biology; as in the lowlands of South America the Andean peoples were decimated by disease upon first contact (plague was spreading across the Inca Empire when Pizzaro arrived with his soldiers). But unlike the lowland societies the Andeans had nature on their side: people of mixed or European ancestry are less well adapted to high altitudes and women without tolerance of the environment still have higher miscarriage rates.

So despite the suboptimal nature of the Andean adaptations vis-a-vis the Tibetan ones, they are certainly better than nothing, and in a relative sense have been very conducive to higher reproductive fitness. And yet why might the Andeans have kludgier adaptations than Tibetans? One variable to consider is time. The probability is that the New World was populated by humans only for the past ~10,000-15,000 years or so, with an outside chance of ~20,000 years (if you trust a particular interpretation of the genetic data, which you probably shouldn’t). By contrast, modern humans have had a presence in the center of Eurasia for ~30,000 years. Generally when populations are exposed to new selective regime the initial adaptations are drastic and exhibit major functional downsides, but they’re much better than the status quo (remember, fitness is relative). Over time genetic modifications mask the deleterious byproducts of the genetic change which emerged initially to deal with the new environment. In other words, selection perfects design over time in a classic Fisherian sense as the genetic architecture converges upon the fitness optimum.*

Another parameter may be the variation available within the population, as the power of selection is proportional to the amount of genetic variation, all things equal. The peoples of the New World tend to be genetically somewhat homogeneous, probably due to the fact that they went through a bottleneck across Berengia, and that they’re already sampled from the terminus of the Old World. A physical anthropologist once told me that the tribes of the Amazon still resemble Siberians in their build. It may be that it takes a homogeneous population with little extant variation a long time indeed to shift trait value toward a local ecological optimum (tropical Amerindians are leaner and less stocky than closely related northern populations, just not particularly in relation to other tropical populations). In contrast, populations in the center of Eurasia have access to a great deal of genetic variation because they’re in proximity to many distinctive groups (the Uyghurs for example are a recent hybrid population with European, South Asian and East Asian ancestry).

So that’s the theoretical backdrop for the differences in adaptations. Shifting to the how the adaptations play out concretely, some aspects of the physiology of Tibetan tolerance of high altitudes are mysterious, but one curious trait is that they actually have lower levels of hemoglobin than one would expect. Andean groups have elevated hemoglobin levels, which is the expected “brute force” response. Interestingly it seems that evolution given less time or stabilizing at a physiologically less optimal equilibrium is more comprehensible to humans! Nature is often more creative than us. In contrast the Tibetan adaptations are more subtle, though interestingly their elevated nitric acid levels may facilitate better blood flow. Though the inheritance patterns of the trait had been observed, the genetic mechanism underpinning it has not been elucidated. Now a new paper in Science identifies some candidate genes for the various physiological quirks of Tibetans by comparing them with their neighbors, and looking at the phenotype in different genotypes with the Tibetan population. Genetic Evidence for High-Altitude Adaptation in Tibet:

Tibetans have lived at very high altitudes for thousands of years, and they have a distinctive suite of physiological traits that enable them to tolerate environmental hypoxia. These phenotypes are clearly the result of adaptation to this environment, but their genetic basis remains unknown. We report genome-wide scans that reveal positive selection in several regions that contain genes whose products are likely involved in high-altitude adaptation. Positively selected haplotypes of EGLN1 and PPARA were significantly associated with the decreased hemoglobin phenotype that is unique to this highland population. Identification of these genes provides support for previously hypothesized mechanisms of high-altitude adaptation and illuminates the complexity of hypoxia response pathways in humans.

Here’s what they did. First, Tibetans are adapted to higher altitudes, Chinese and Japanese are not. The three groups are relatively close genetically in terms of ancestry, so the key is to look for signatures of positive selection in regions of the genome which have been identified as possible candidates in terms of functional significance in relation to pathways which may modulate the traits of interest. After finding potential regions of the genome possibly under selection in Tibetans but not the lowland groups, they fixed upon variants which are at moderate frequencies in Tibetans and noted how the genes track changes in the trait.

This figure from the supplements shows how the populations are related genetically:

In a worldwide context the three groups are pretty close, but they also don’t overlap. The main issue I would have with this presentation is that the Chinese data is from the HapMap, and they’re from Beijing. This has then a northeast Chinese genetic skew (I know that people who live in Beijing may come from elsewhere, but recent work which examines Chinese phylogeography indicates that the Beijing sample is not geographically diversified), while ethnic Tibetans overlap a great deal with Han populations in the west of China proper. In other words, I wouldn’t be surprised if the separation between Han and Tibetan was far less if you took the Chinese samples from Sichuan or Gansu, where Han and Tibetans have lived near each other for thousands of years.

But these issues of phylogenetic difference apart, we know for a fact that lowland groups do not have the adaptations which are distinctive to the Tibetans. To look for genetic differences they focused on 247 loci, some from the HIF pathway, which is important for oxygen homeostasis, as well genes from Gene Ontology categories which might be relevant to altitude adaptations. Table 1 has the breakdown by category.

Across these regions of the genome they performed two haplotype based tests which detect natural selection, EHH and iHS. Both of these tests basically find regions of the genome which have reduced variation because of a selective sweep, whereby selection at a specific region of the genome has the effect of dragging along large neutral segments adjacent to the original copy of the favored variant. EHH is geared toward detection of sweeps which have nearly reached fixation, in other words the derived variant has nearly replaced the ancestral after a bout of natural selection. iHS is better at picking up sweeps which have not resulted in the fixation of the derived variant. The paper A Map of Recent Positive Selection in the Human Genome outlines the differences between EHH and iHS in more detail. They looked at the three populations and wanted to find regions of the genome where Tibetans, but not the other two groups, were subject to natural selection as defined by positive signatures with EHH and iHS. They scanned over 200 kb windows of the genome, and found that 10 of their candidate genes were in regions where Tibetans came up positive for EHH and iHS, but the other groups did not. Since these tests do produce false positives they ran the same procedure on 240 random candidate genes (7 genes were in regions where Chinese and Japanese came up positive, so these were removed from the set of candidates), and came up with average EHH and iHS positive hits of ~2.7 and ~1.4 genes after one million resamplings (specifically, these are genes where Tibetans were positive, the other groups negative). Their candidate genes focused on altitude related physiological pathways yielded 6 for EHH and 5 for iHS (one gene came up positive for both tests, so 10 total). This indicates to them these are not false positives, something made more plausible by the fact that we know that Tibetans are biologically adapted to higher altitudes and we have an expectation that these genes are more likely than random expectation to have a relationship to altitude adaptations.

Finally, they decided to look at two genes with allelic variants which exist at moderate frequencies in Tibetans, EGLN1 and PPARA. The procedure is simple, you have three genotypes, and you see if there are differences across the 31 individuals by genotype in terms of phenotype. In this case you want to look at hemoglobin concentration, where those who are well adapted have lower concentrations. Figure 3 is rather striking:

Even with the small sample sizes the genotypic effect jumps out at you. This isn’t too surprising, previous work has shown that these traits are highly heritable, and that they vary within the Tibetan population. There’s apparently a sex difference in terms of hemoglobin levels, so they did a regression analysis, and it illustrates how strong the genetic effect from these alleles are:

My main question: why do Tibetans still have variation on these genes after all this time? Shouldn’t they be well adapted to high altitudes by now? A prosaic answer may be that the Tibetans have mixed with other populations recently, and so have added heterozygosity through admixture. But there are several loci here which are fixed in Tibetans, and not the HapMap Chinese and Japanese. For admixture to be a good explanation one presumes that the groups with which the Tibetans mixed would have been fixed for those genes as well, but not the ones at moderate frequencies. This may be true, but it seems more likely that admixture alone can not explain this pattern. As the Andean example suggests adaptation to high altitudes is not easy or simple. Until better options arrive on the scene, kludges will suffice. It may be that the Tibetans are still going through the sieve of selection, and will continue to do so for the near future. Or, there may be balancing dynamics on the genes which exhibit heterozygosity, so that fixation is prevented.

No matter what the truth turns out to be, this is surely just the beginning. A deeper investigation of the genetic architecture of Andeans and Ethiopians, both of which have their own independent adaptations, will no doubt tell us more. Finally, I wonder if these high altitude adaptations have fitness costs which we’re not cognizant of, but which Tibetans living in India may have some sense of.

* Additionally, it may be that archaic hominin groups were resident in the Himalaya for nearly one million years. Neandertal admixture evidence in Eurasians should change our priors when evaluating the possibility for adaptive introgression on locally beneficial alleles.